Imaginary Vietnams

The Punisher, art (1994) by Gabriele Dell'Otto

Comic book superhero The Punisher debuts in The Amazing Spider-Man #129, cover dated February 1974. The Jackal hires The Punisher, then a mercenary, to assassinate Spider-Man, convincing him that Spider-Man is a common criminal. When the heroes realize they share mutual goals, and The Punisher resigns his contract, Spider-Man asks why The Punisher, a U.S. Marine, isn't in Asia fighting the war. The Punisher looks aggrieved, saying he has his reasons, and walks away.

Nearing the end of her book Bring the War Home, historian Kathleen Belew describes how the rise of paramilitary White Power organizations justified the accumulation of paramilitary technology in civilian police forces. Facing White Power revolutionaries armed with AK-47s and rocket launchers, the police needed stopping power sufficient to face such excesses. So they began collecting surplus military gear, including tanks, small artillery, and more. The militarization of American police was, initially, a justified circumstance.

But Belew stops counting around 1995. An academic historian, Belew limits herself to documentation, avoids speculation, and stays away from events too recent for dispassionate context. Thus she avoids commenting upon how the militarized police force, mustered to combat militarized domestic terrorist cells, has more recently channeled its aggression onto poor communities, especially communities of color. Tactical forces created to fight White Power groups have begun tacitly doing White Power work on the state’s behalf.

Unlike Professor Belew, I have no such academic restraint. I can observe that since the post-Vietnam White Power movement has dwindled to a shadow of its Clinton-era might, the police have used techniques which the movement first prefected, against the movement’s preferred targets. Just a few years ago, news-hawks like me watched decommissioned Army tanks, repainted in municipal PD colors, patrolling the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, and other cities, keeping the terrified Black populace controlled.

Vietnam War mythology plays heavily into this unfolding history. Professor Belew describes how Vietnam veterans, pumped on anti-Communist propaganda, trained to kill a vaguely defined enemy, returned to America discouraged by the brass’ unwillingness to fight with unrestrained brutality. The Viet-Cong, according to future White Power leaders like Louis Beam and Tom Posey, were so inhuman and pervasive, that killing anybody who looked vaguely Vietnamese was perforce justified to preserve American values and national identity.

This myth, of an overwhelming enemy and a timid government, motivated White Power revolutionaries to declare war on America’s government. But after Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing turned even die-hard conservatives against the militia movement, the mytholgy underwent a massive transformation. The federal government armed its civilian police forces to fight a guerilla war without front lines on American soil, appropriating the White Power movement’s driving narrative for state use.

Then, the police began internalizing that myth.

The Oath Keepers, an anti-state militia, recruiting on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri

New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio got elected, partly, by promising to rescind heavy-handed policing tactics used against poor and minority communities by Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg. However, in 2014, a police officer killed nickel-and-dime criminal Eric Garner in an illegal choke hold, and DeBlasio’s response was… tepid. It took five years for the NYPD to fire offending officer Daniel Pantaleo, and the police union turned Pantaleo into a hero for killing a civilian.

Though this represents one anecdote, it demonstrates a police culture that sees civilians, especially those of a particular complexion, as incipient enemies of the state, policing as a war to preserve powerful but poorly defined values, and government as an impediment to police forces doing their jobs. The Vietnam myth that metastasized into White Power has become, mutatis mutandis, the mythology of American police. And some law enforcement have chosen, as their mascot, The Punisher.

In a recent interview, Marvel Comics writer Gerry Conway expressed dismay about police appropriating The Punisher. “To me,” he says, “it’s disturbing whenever I see authority figures embracing Punisher iconography.” Except I’d suggest, these police fundamentally aren’t embracing The Punisher; they’re embracing a culture-wide myth of former soldiers returning home, facing a nation that’s changed without them, and retreating into the one skill they’ve learned: punishing anyone who deviates from their script with unstoppable violence.

Throughout her book, Professor Belew notes that the real Vietnam doesn’t matter to White Power organizers. It’s the story that drives them, not the facts. Unfortunately, that story, that mythology, has drifted from violent anti-state terrorists, into the mainstream of the state’s instrument of order. The Punisher was never about justice, he was about quieting dissidents. That’s why rebellious punk teenagers and a militarized, war-myth police have suborned him. Because Vietnam was never about reality.